Citizens United vs. Friedrich

Mark Joseph Stern, writing for Slate about Hillary Clinton's NH concession speech, notes in passing a looming contradiction between the Friedrich vs. California Teachers case and the terrible Citizen's United decision.

Folks tend to remember the bizarre reasoning that corporations are people, money is free speech, and there is no appearance of corruption when a corporation hands an elected official a giant suitcase full of money. But one of the arguments that the Supremes rejected in Citizens United was this one:

This problem arises because of the structure of corporations: the owners of the corporations, the shareholders, do not control how the assets of the corporation are used; the managers do. This separation of ownership and control is known as the agency problem in corporate law. The agency problem presents the potential for the shareholders’ agents, corporate management, to use the shareholders’ property, the assets of the corporation, for management’s own purposes. One argument made in favor of limiting corporate expenditures is that management can use the assets of the corporations to support political causes shareholders do not agree with, thereby violating the shareholders’ rights of association. The potential violation of this right gives the government a compelling interest justifying speech limitations.

In other words, shareholders could find their corporate assets being used to support a political cause they do not support.

The Supremes were unimpressed, and rejected that argument when they decided Citizens United.

Yet it is, of course, the exact argument of the plaintiffs in Friedrichs, who don't want anybody to ever give fees to unions for political purposes.

Well, actually, it's not the same argument. It's a stronger one, since the CU argument involves shareholders' actual property, while Friedrichs involves taking up a separate collection for political purposes. Friedrich's doesn't want the union to be able to ask you to kick in for cab fare to drive me to a rally for a politician you hate; Citizens United says I can take a car we jointly own and drive it through your garden.

There is no reason to expect that this inconsistency will carry the day. But if Friedrichs wins against unions, as seems likely-ish, it will be one more sign that today's court believes that all corporations are people, and some people are more equal than others. 

College Board's Real Business

Here's the morning's promoted tweet from the College Board

College Board Search's PSAT database increased 4.1%. Reach these students today! https://t.co/sOSYdVqbbY

— The College Board (@CollegeBoard) January 12, 2016

That link takes you to the College Board page tagged with "Transformed Services for Smart Recruiting." Here you can find all sorts of useful headings like

Student Search Service (registered trademark)

Connect with students and meet recruitment goals using precise, deep data from the largest and richest database of college-bound students in the nation.

Enrollment Planning Service (trademark)

 Achieve your enrollment goals with powerful data analysis tools that efficiently facilitate exploration of the student population and inform a smarter recruitment plan.

Segment Analysis Service (trademark)

 Leverage sophisticated geographic, attitudinal and behavioral information to focus your enrollment efforts and achieve better yields from admission through graduation.

That last one, with its ability to leverage attitudinal and behavioral data-- how the heck do they do that? Exactly what is in the big fat College Board data base.
 
There's a phone number for customers to call, and of course, "customers" does not mean "students and their families." It means all the nice people who keep the College Board in business by paying for the data that they've mined from their testing products. Those folks can click over to the College Board Search Support page to learn that every high school student who ever took a College Board test product (PSAT, SAT, AP exam, or any of the many new SAT products) is in the database.

I don't know that the data miners at the College Board are any more nefarious than those at Facebook or a television network. Though those at least give the datamined subjects a free "product" to play with-- the College Board manages to mine students for data and get them to pay for the privilege.

But so many people think of the College Board and its test products as some sort of public service or educational necessity. It would be useful if we could all remember who they really are, what they really do, and how they make their money.

NY: Those Peoples' Kids

It doesn't get much plainer than this. The headline of the New York Chalkbeat piece is "Hoping to attract gentrifiers, a troubled school gets a makeover and new admissions policy."

The story is about Satellite West Middle School, a school redesigned to focus on science and art, renamed the Dock Street School for STEAM Studies. And it addresses this question posed by Patrick Wall in the article: How can middle-class families in gentrifying areas be convinced to send their children to local schools with less-than-stellar reputations?

Because District 13 runs on choice (parents can apply to any middle school), Dock Street must find a way to appeal to the now-increasingly-upscale parents in its community. And that means being more careful about who, exactly, they let in. Not just improving the quality of the education offered by the school, but by screening admissions. By making sure that only the Right Children get in.

It is an understandable dilemma for parents, and I'm never willing to say to a parent, "Look, you should put political and philosophical concerns ahead of your own child's concerns."

But the new development underlines two big lies about the value and benefits of charters to a city's education system.

First, it shows, once again, the one real trick that charter operators know and which some public systems have learned to adopt-- to get a better school, you need to swap out your old students for "better" ones. When a charter or turnaround specialist or state takeover district manages to improve a school with exactly the same student population that was there when the school was deemed "failing" in the first place, that will be noteworthy. But mostly they do what Dock Street is doing-- bar the door and only let in those students who will improve the school. That's exactly what Cris Barbic learned just before he gave up on Tennessee's state takeover district.

That's great for the school, and good for the newly acquired batch of students, but it still leaves a whole bunch of students in the wind, without a school intent on educating them.

Second, it shows that the power of charters and choice to "free" students from their zip code is an illusion. Charter fans will argue that wealthier parents exercise choice by sorting themselves into better neighborhoods, that housing choice is a version of school choice. So, the theory goes, we mix that up by allowing people to school outside their neighborhood. School choice can overcome the effects of real estate choice.

But there are two things going on at Dock Street. One is that school choice is struggling to keep up with real estate choice-- that affluent parents are moving into a gentrifying neighborhood and they want nicer schools to match. School choice as it emerges in District 13 is not about escaping real estate choice, but about keeping pace with it, reinforcing it.

Given the choice, parents want to make school choices that match their real estate choice, not override it.

While Dock Street plans to strive for greater diversity, [redesign team member Cynthia] McKnight said, many parents also made clear that they would not consider the school if it continued to admit any student who applied.

“A lot of parents wouldn’t send their children here if they didn’t have a screen,” she said.

More affluent people don't want to live next door to Those People, and they don't want to send their kids to school with Those Peoples' Kids. Uncoupling choice of school from choice of neighborhood just requires parents to make those two choices separately, but the notion that charter-choice systems somehow erase the class and race segregation effects of real estate-- well, that just doesn't seem to be how it works.

In fact, those non-gentry who still live in the neighborhood, who haven't been pushed out yet, now get to see their children pushed out of their neighborhood school because they just aren't the Right Sort of People.

Meanwhile, Those People and their children are pushed out of another neighborhood, and those that stick around are pushed out of their neighborhood school. And another choice system ends up pushing Those Peoples' Kids around like so many low-income hot potatoes.This is no way to run a public school system.

Maryland University President's Loyalty Purge

Remember the story about the university president in Maryland who directed his faculty to "drown the bunnies" in order to improve their retention and graduation numbers? Well, according to Inside Higher Ed, he has gone after and fired faculty members that he considers disloyal-- including the adviser of the school paper that outed his bunny comment.

President Simon Newman was hired as the head of the small Roman Catholic university a year ago, with not an iota experience in higher education. Instead, Newman was plucked from the world of business, specializing in private equity and starting businesses.

Newman fired a tenured professor, Thane M. Naberhaus of the philosophy department, with a letter that included this rationale:

As an employee of Mount St. Mary's University, you owe a duty of loyalty to this university and to act in a manner consistent with that duty. However, your recent actions, in my opinion and that of others, have violated that duty and clearly justify your termination.

Newman seems to believe that loyalty to the university means never questioning the decisions of Newman himself. Newman blamed Naberhaus for "considerable damage" to the university, threatened him with a lawsuit, and banned him from the campus. His page has been wiped from the university website.

David Rehm, the provost who told Newman to hold off on his freshman flushing plan, was removed from his post as provost.

Newman also fired Edward Egan, a professor of law, alumnus, son of an alumnus, and former trustee of the university. Egan was the advisor of the Mountain Echo, the school newspaper that broke the story of Newman's bunny drowning instructions. A quick look at the Echo front page shows that the controversy has not died down in the last few weeks, with letters coming in from many alumni:

When I arrived on campus as a freshman in 1988, Mount St. Mary’s was featured in The Chronicle of Higher Learning for its innovative Freshman Core program. Today my mother wouldn’t enroll a dog there. It is sad to see my alma mater go downhill in this manner.
            -- Laura R. Zeugner

After reading The Mountain Echo’s article, the Washington Post article, and the Board of Trustees letter to the Mountain Echo regarding the recent issues with attempts at “boosting” student retention rates, I am very disturbed not only by the initial approach, but the college’s response to the issue.
            -- Ken Buckler, Editor, WashCo Chronicle 

The onus is not on the newspaper to explain or defend. The paper does need to be accurate, offer all sides a chance to comment, and relate its facts in clear language, and you have done that. Yes, the result is sometimes messy and people get upset that words they thought private are now public. That is the price to pay for authority and power in a country with a free press 
             -- John W. Miller, Staff Reporter, Wall Street Journal

As an academic deeply invested in Catholic higher education, I wish the Mount well in every way.  I thus write to assure Mr. Coyne that the Echo’s excellent reporting about student retention efforts will not in fact “render incalculable damage to the reputation of this University and its institutional integrity” (“Letter to the Editor,” 1/19/16). Quite the contrary, the fine work of the student reporters and editors is a testament to the Mount’s educational success.  What would damage the institution’s reputation among other universities, both Catholic and secular, is the perception that its leaders are attempting to intimidate less powerful members of the community and stifle discussion about important matters.  As every teacher knows, silencing students is incompatible with educating them.
                --   Karen Stohr, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Philosophy, Senior Research Scholar, Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University

The Mountain Echo ran one letter of support from a data analyst and alumnus in Newman's office, who said that of course, Newman never meant to push out low ability students who were hard workers. So maybe the intent was only to drown lazy bunnies?

Accounts of fallout from the article in the Mountain Echo paint a picture of a president and board chairman (John E. Coyne III) trying to browbeat the paper into silence. And now, under new advisers, the newest piece in the paper is a fun story about studying in Florence. The school paper has nothing in it about the firings.

And one other tidbit of info from the IHE report-- a dozen faculty members created a campus chapter of the American Association of University Professors less than a week before the purging of the three professors. The firings removed two of the twelve.

Meanwhile, Coyne has been trying to do damage control by offering explanation and justification for Newman's plan, like this e-mail to staff:

“We found that the retention program, as conceived, is indeed meant to retain students by identifying and helping at-risk students much earlier in their first semester — the first six weeks — than we have ever done before. It takes an innovative approach that includes gathering and analyzing information from a range of sources, including our faculty whom we have trained on how to have rich, supportive conversations with students. We also noted that the design of a (if necessary) thoughtful, eventual conversation about the student’s own discernment process and the refund of tuition was also intended to be in keeping with our Catholic identity.”

Nice try. The attempt to fire and silence dissenters shows just how co-operative and collegial university leaders are, particularly when faced with anything that doesn't go just as they want it to. The university has characterized Newman's "drown the bunnies" rhetoric as a poor metaphor choice, but it would seem to be revealing about the University's current operational philosophy.

And as far as discernment-- when you think that the cause of your bad PR is people who won't keep your secrets for you instead of your own stupid, ill-considered ideas, then you are in need of some serious discernment yourself. Mount St. Mary's may once have been a wonderful university, but right now it's an ugly, ugly mess, and the blame for that rests squarely on Newman and Coyne, which means that no matter how many people they fire for being "disloyal," Mount St. Mary's will be in trouble.

VA: Stupid Lawmaker Tricks

Mark Obenshain is a lawyer/legislator in Virginia who has all sorts of cool ideas for laws to pass.

Back in 2009, he proposed a law that would require all women who had a miscarriage while not right near a doctor to report that miscarriage within twenty-four hours. He was reportedly trying to respond to a case in which a woman threw her dead child in a dumpster; he wanted a law that would allow her prosecution, but he came up with something so broad and ill-considered that it was untenable.

Not thinking things through seems to be an Obenshain specialty. He ran for Attorney General and lost. His "Support Team Obenshain" website hasn't had a new post since August, 2015, when he happily announced his gig as Virginia Campaign Chairman for Scott Walker. Oopsies.

Obenshain also likes to take a hard-right swing at education. Like any good conservative values politician, he would like to strip local school boards of their power, so he's proposed a charter school law that would give the state board of education the power to authorize charters. But local school districts already have that power, and the state of Virginia just isn't clamoring for charters-- it's almost as if they find their public system plenty okay. Putting authorization of charters out of local hands of course creates issues for local taxpayers-- someone else puts up a charter school in your community and you have to pay for it whether you want it there or not. And actual conservatives have a soft spot for local control. Obenshain is apparently not one of those conservatives.

But also at the top of his Haven't Really Thought This Through list is SB 737. This is a pretty straightforward bill:

Payment of public employees for time away from their official duties; employee organizations; penalty. Prohibits public employers from paying leave or benefits to any public employee to directly or indirectly work for or on behalf of an employee organization, professional association, labor union, or labor organization. A violation is a Class 5 felony.  

No doubt Obenshain was intent on stopping teachers and other public employees from drawing a paycheck while they were off cavorting with their damnable unions. And that's obnoxious enough. But Obenshain is perhaps unaware that many teachers belong to "professional associations" that are non-union in nature.

For instance, a band or choir director who was taking students to a district band or choral event sponsored by the Virginia Music Educators Association would be barred from being paid by this law. Coaches that go to training events by a coaching association. Principals and superintendents who attend training and educational sessions sponsored by any number of professional groups. Teachers and staff who attend professional gatherings of any sort at the direction of a district that might want to send a teacher to a convention to pick up new professional skills. And that's before we even get to the question of what constitutes "indirectly" working for any groups.

And it's a Class 5 felony. Which means that the possible penalties are

a term of imprisonment of not less than one year nor more than 10 years, or in the discretion of the jury or the court trying the case without a jury, confinement in jail for not more than 12 months and a fine of not more than $2,500, either or both.


It's a particularly odious law because all of those people already donate huge mountains of hours to their districts-- most teachers do.

But mostly this is just dumb law writing, so broad and sloppy that the Law of Unintended Consequences will have a field day trashing all sorts of things that not even an unreasonable faux conservative values legislator with a bad tooth would want to see trashed. If you're in Virginia, contact a legislator and explain why this is a dumb idea.

CAP: The Promise of Testing

CAP is back with another one of its "reports." This one took four whole authors to produce, and it's entitled "Praise Joyous ESSA and Let a Thousand Tests Bloom." Ha! Kidding. The actual report is "Implementing the Every Student Succeeds Act: Toward a Coherent, Aligned Assessment System."

The report is sixty-some pages of highly-polished CAP-flavored reformster baloney, and I've read it so you don't have to, but be warned-- this journey will be neither short nor sweet. But we have to take it in one shot, so you can see the entirety of it, because there are large swaths of their argument that you probably agree with.

Who is CAP, again?

The Center for American Progress is billed as a left-leaning thinky tank, but it has also served as a holding tank for Clintonian beltway denizens. It was formed by John Podesta and run by him between his gigs as Bill Clinton's Chief of Staff and Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, and has provided food and shelter to many Clinton staffers who didn't want to have to leave DC while waiting for their next shot at the Big Show.

CAP loves the whole privatizing charterfying profiteering common core cheering reformster agenda. In fact, CAP's deep and abiding love for the Common Core has burned brighter than a thousand stars and longer than even Jeb! Bush's willingness to keep saying that name. CAP has stymied me, taxing my ability to invent new versions of the headline "CAP says something stupid in support of Common Core" (see here, here, here, and here).

If the last fifteen years have seen the building of a revolving door, education-industrial complex on par with the military and food industries, then CAP is right in the center of that culture. They have never met an ed reform idea they didn't like or promote, and they are not afraid to manufacture slick, baloney-stuffed "reports" to push the corporate agenda.

So that's who produced this big chunk of goofiness.

Introduction

Like many other advocacy groups, CAP sees a golden opportunity in ESSA, and that golden opportunity is all about the testing.

States and districts must work together to seize this opportunity to design coherent, aligned assessment systems that are based on rigorous standards. These systems need to include the smart and strategic use of formative and interim tests that provide real-time feedback to inform instruction, as well as high-quality summative tests that measure critical thinking skills and student mastery of standards.

So how can states build on the research base and knowledge regarding high-quality assessments in order to design systems that do not just meet the requirements of federal law but actually drive student learning to a higher level—especially for students from marginalized communities?

And later, CAP says that this report "outlines a vision and provides specific recommendations to help federal, state and local leaders realize the promise of tests." The promise of tests? Not students, not education, not learning, not empowering communities to help their children grow into their best selves. Nope. The promise of tests. So, as is too often the case, we've skipped right the question of "should we" and will proceed directly to "how," setting out once again to do a better job of more precisely hitting the absolutely wrong target. Yay.

History Lesson from Alternate Universe

CAP will now set the stage by hanging a backdrop of Things That Are Not True.

High-quality assessments play a critical role in student learning and school improvement. No, not really. Well, maybe, in the sense that "critical" is a pretty vague word.

High-quality tests can also show how well states, districts, and schools are doing in meeting the educational needs of all students. No. At least, not any allegedly high quality tests that currently exist.

CAP is willing to acknowledge that testing is "driving the agenda" and that's Not Good. They even acknowledge that despite their "research" showing that tests only take up 2% of school time, lots of folks have noticed that standardized testing has become the focus of too many schools.

CAP wants you to know that the ESSA has many cool, shiny features. It requires states to use broader measures and afford flexibility. CAP thinks ESSA might lead to less teacher evaluation emphasis on testing, maybe. There is money available for tweaking testing, including $$ for "innovation."

There's more history, like a history of tests. CAP equates the Socratic method with testing. They also cite the establishment of the Chinese testing that helped kick off centuries of conformity and non-innovation (read Yong Zhao's Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon). We work our way through the present, skipping the parts where tests were useful for eugenics and Keeping the Lessers in Their Place.

Then we insert the usual Story of Accountability, beginning in 1983 Nation at Risk, which I always think is a bold choice since Nation at Risk predicted that the country would have collapsed by now, so maybe it's not such a great authority.

Then we move on to the "promise of the Common Core State Standards," and as usual, CAP is shameless in its willingness to recycle old baloney like "the Common Core Standards are comparable to the academic standards in the highest performing nations in the world" (this leads us, by a circuitous route, back to some Fordham Core promotional work) and in reference to the Core testing, "like the Common Core, these tests are more rigorous and of higher quality than what many previous states had before." It's a big word salad with baloney on top. CAP also lauds the imaginary "shifts in learning" which are supported by a footnote to the Common Core website, so you know it must be true.

The state of testing

CAP explains the three types of test (formative, interim and summative) and notes that federally mandated tests are summative, and are "used to give students, parents and educators a detailed picture of student progress toward meeting state standards over the past school year" and I wonder, do they giggle when they write this, or have they smacked themselves the brain with the PR sledgehammer so many times that they just don't feel it any more? The current Big Standardized Tests of course don't provide a detailed picture of anything at all.

CAP also wants us to know about high-quality tests, which "measure critical thinking and problem-solving skills" and why don't we also say that they measure the number of unicorns grazing in the fields of rainbow cauliflower growing behind the school, because they do both equally well. But CAP wants us to know that "good assessments are also field tested and evaluated by experts," so suddenly many of the BS Tests aren't looking too good.

CAP acknowledges the anti-test movement, but goes on to say that despite the backlash, national polling data shows that people really love the tests. Why, polls by Education Next and Education Post both found signs of the testing love! This is as surprising as a poll commissioned by the National Mustard Manufacturers that discovers a wide-spread love for mustard-- Post and Next are both unabashedly advocate, push for, and profit from the testing, reform and privatization industry. CAP also takes us on a tour of the many states that have tried to tweak the testing biz one way or another, and I would take you through those, but we still have pages and pages to go, my friends.

Methodology

CAP takes this moment to share their methodology, which appears to be that they held some focus groups, talked to some people, and checked in with some parents, some rich and some poor, according to CAP. How these people were either located or selected is a mystery--they could have been random strangers from the street or CAP family members. They also made sure to talk to some other thinky tank pro-reform profiteering groups like Achieve, the Education Trust, and the College Board. They describe their sample as a "wide variety of stakeholders and experts," and we will just have to take their word for it.

What did they find out? 

So what are some of things discovered in this vaguely defined researchy sort of activity?

Parents want better tests.

Here we see a return of the classic "just misunderstood" story line; the value of tests needs to be "made more evident" to parents. The report quotes one parent as "not against standardized testing, because there is a need to understand on a national level whether our children are being educated and where different districts need to have extra resources and the like." Which is a great quote, and might be a useful purpose for testing, except that it doesn't work that way under current reformster programs. Instead of, "Hey, this school is clearly underfunded and undersupported," we hear cries of, "Hey, this school has low scores. We must rescue students from it with charters and maybe close it, too."

And while parents in the focus group seem to see global and large-scale uses for testing, they aren't getting much use out of them for their own children.

Teachers do not get the time and support they need

This section is shockingly frank, reporting teachers who got PD about the PARCC when it wasn't completed, and teachers who report essentially being told to get those test scores up, never mind the regular instruction. Shocking, huh? I wonder what created that sort of atmosphere. We will all just numbly skip over the issue of whether these reformsters ever listen to a single word that teachers say, because remember-- when you want to creatively disrupt and make over an entire field, it's important to disregard any noise fomr the trained, experienced practitioners in that field.

Communications to stakeholders is weak 

Yes, it's the PR. Common Core and BS Tests are just misunderstood. If only people could be re-educated about the tests. Maybe at a nice camp somewhere. (Bonus sidebar lauds the PARCC for their clear and colorful report card, which uses nice graphics to tell parents far less useful information than could be gleaned from a five-minute phone call to your child's teacher.)

Fun sidenote: several parents reported that they got the most useful information about testing from the John Oliver show segment on tests. That was probably not the kind of info that CAP wanted to have spread.

The Test lacks value for individual students

And that, boys and girls, is how a bureaucrat translates "The students sense that the BS Tests are a bunch of time-wasting bullshit with no connection to their actual lives." In fact, some parents and teachers said they had the impression that BS Test scores aren't even used to influence instruction. It's true. Instruction is also not very influenced by reading the warts of a grey toad under a full moon.

End-of-year summatives are not aligned to instruction

Well, no, they aren't. And as long as your plan is built around a large-scale, one-size-fits-all BS test, they never will be.

Too much test prep is occuring

Well, duh. The BS Tests have high stakes. And while CAP wants to pretend that new BS Tests are just so high quality and awesome that test prep is a waste of everyone's time score-wise, most everybody's experience is the opposite. The most authentic assessment matches the instruction and the actual task being learned. Since reformsters have fixed it so that teachers cannot change the assessment, the only way to make the BS Tests a more authentic assessment is to change what we teach. As long as schools are locked into a statewide high stakes BS Test beyond their control, there will be test prep, and lots of it.

CAP found that test prep was more prevalent among the poorer students. Again, duh. Lower socio-economic status correlates pretty directly to standardized test results. Lower SES students are the ones who need the most extra help to get up to speed on the twisty mindset needed to play the "What does the test writer want me to say here" game.

Weak logistics and testing windows and nutsy bolty things

If the test must be given on a computer and there are only thirty computers in the building, there's a problem. I'm inclined to think the problem is that you are requiring the students to take the test on a computer. Also, CAP has concerns about timing of test results and test taking allowing for accurate measures and useful feedback. I'm prepared to reassure CAP that no matter when or how my students take the BS Test, it will not provide an accurate measure or useful feedback, so y'all can just relax.

So what does CAP think we should do about all this?

So here's what CAP thinks the state, district and school authorities can do "to improve the quality of assessments, address concerns about overtesting, and make assessments more valuable for students, parents, and teachers." And if you've been reading carefully, you can guess where this is going.

Here's what states should do

Develop rules for "robust" testing. Okay, CAP says "principles," but they mean rules. Write some state-level rules about what ever test should look like. Yessirree, what I need in my classroom is some suit from the state capital to tell me how to create an assessment.

Conduct alignment pogroms. Okay, maybe that's not the word they used. But they suggest that states check all up and down the school systems and make sure that every single teacher is fully aligned to the standards (including curriculum and homework). Because thanks to the Ed-Secretary-neutering powers of ESSA, reformsters can now shoot for total instructional control of every school district without raising the Federal Overreach Alarm. Oh, and the alignment should run K-16, so don't think you're getting off so easy, Dr. College Professor.

Since districts may not have the time and resources to make sure that every single solitary assessment is aligned and high quality, states should be ready to lend a hand. Give them some money. Create all the tests and assignments for them, or, you know, just hire some willing corporation to so it.

Demand a quick turnaround on test results. Because that creates more "buy-in" at the local level. Also "a quick turnaround also creates more value, and educators and families can use the assessment results more readily in their decision-making." Oh, yeah-- everyone is just waiting on pins and needles so they can make decisions about Young Chris's future. But about that...

Increase the value of tests for parents, teachers and students. How could we do that? By making better tests! Ha! Just kidding. By offering rewards, like college credits for good performance. Or awards and prizes for high scores. Like stickers and ribbons? Yes, that will make the BS Tests so much more valuable.

Jump on the innovative assessment development grant-band wagon. And here comes the punchline:

If states move forward with performance-based or competency-based assessments, they should consider carefully whether their districts and educators have the capacity and time to create high-quality, valid, reliable, and comparable performance assessments. Instead of looking to dramatically change the content of assessments, states should consider how they can dramatically change the delivery of assessments. States should explore moving away from a single end-of-year test and toward the use of shorter, more frequent interim assessments that measure student learning throughout the year and can be combined into a single summative determination. 

Yes, all-testing, all the time. It solves all of our problems-- with one perfectly aligned system that constantly logs and records and data-crunches every canned assignment and delivers the assessments seamlessly through the computer, we can plug students in and monitor every educational step of every educational day.

Finally, states should step up their communication game with better, prettier and more explainier printouts from the uber-aligned 360 degree teaching machine system, so that parents will understand just how much their elder sibling loves them.

What should local districts do? 

Bend over and kiss their autonomy goodbye? Ha! Just kidding. CAP would never say that out loud.

Get rid of redundant tests, preferably not the ones that are created by favored vendors.

"Build local capacity to support teachers' understanding of assessment design and administration." God, sometimes I think these guys are morons, and sometimes I think they are evil geniuses. Doesn't "support" sound so much nicer than "re-educate" or "properly indoctrinate." Because I have my own pretty well-developed understanding of assessment design and administration, but if they knew it, I don't think CAP would support it.

"Create coherent systems of high-quality formative and interim assessments that are aligned with state standards." Buy your entire assessment system from a single vendor. One size will fit all.

"Better communicate with parents about tests. To build trust, districts should be more transparent around assessments. This includes posting testing calendars online, releasing sample items, and doing more to communicate about the assessments." You know what's an excellent way to build trust? Behave in a trustworthy manner. Just saying. Also, this is not transparency. Transparency would include things like, say, releasing all the test items so students and parents could see exactly where Young Pat was marked right or wrong.

Tackle logistics. Remember how hard it is for schools to test many students on few computers? Districts should tackle that. It's not clear if that should be, like, a clean ankle grab tackle or districts can go ahead an clothesline that logistic. But CAP does have concrete examples, like "Plan well in advance" with the goal of "minimizing disruption." Thanks, CAP. I bet no district leaders ever thought of planning in advance. I can't believe you gave dynamite advice like that away for free.

What should schools do?

Make testing less torturous. Let students go pee.

Hold an explain-the-test social night. Have principals announce open-office hours so that any parent can stop by at any time to chat about the tests, because I'm sure the principal's day is pretty wide open and flexible.

Tell teachers things so that when parents ask questions, the teachers know the answers.

Oh, and stop unnecessary test prep. Just keep the necessary test prep, which is as much as you need to keep your numbers up. But thanks for the tip-- lots of teachers were in their classroom saying, "This test prep is a total waste of time, but I'm going to do it anyway just for shits and giggles, because I certainly didn't have it in my mind to teach my students useful things."

I am pretty sure that the further from broad policy strokes and the closer to actual classroom issues they get, the dumber CAP becomes.

How about the feds?

Use Title I as a means of threatening states that don't do all the jobs we gave them above. Help all the states that want to build the next generation all-day all-testing regimes. Spread best practices about assessment, because man, if there's anything we have learned over the past fifteen years, it's that when you want good solid answers about how to teach and assess your students, the federal government is the place to turn.

And the final recommendation?

If you are still reading, God bless you, but we needed to travel this twisty road in one go to see where it led.

It is the reformsters oldest and most favorite trick-- X is a clear and present problem, therefore you must accept Y as a solution, and I am going to sell X so well that you will forget to notice that I never explain how Y is any sort of solution.

Overtesting is a problem. Bad testing is a problem. Testing that yields up no useful results is a problem. Bad testing as an annual exercise in time-wasting futility is a problem. Testing driving instruction is a problem. CAP has given more ground on these issues than ever, but it appears to be a ju-jitsu move in hopes of converting all that anti-testing energy into support for Performance Based Education.

Don't like testing? Well, the solution is more testing. All the time. In a one-size-fits-all canned package of an education program. And here's the final huge irony. This is CAP wrapping up with a description of the long-term goal

system leaders should develop a robust, coherent, and aligned system of standards and assessments that measures student progress toward meeting challenging state standards. This exam system should be deeply grounded in the standards as assessed by an end-of-year summative test. Formative and interim assessments administered throughout the year will routinely—at natural transition points in the instructional program, such as the end of a unit—assess student understanding and progress and provide the results to teachers, parents, and students in close to real time. This system will enable everyone involved in a student’s education to make adjustments where needed in order to support learning so that no student slips through the cracks.

You know who does this sort of thing well already? Good, trained, professional classroom teachers. We assess daily, wrap those results back into our plans for the next day, and adjust our instruction to the needs and issues of individual students. We don't give pointless tests that are redundant or disconnected. We wrap larger and more formal assessments in with the informal assessments and we do it while maintaining instruction and looking after our students as if they were actual live human beings. And we do it all in  timely manner. Of course, we don't do the things that CAP considers most critical.

For this assessment system to be as useful as possible, alignment is key. All assessments—formative, interim, and summative—must align with academic standards. 

At the end of the day, CAP loves testing very much. But the thing they love even more is broadly adopted, all-knowing, all-controlling standards. One size fits all, selected by some Wiser Higher Authority who somehow knows what all human beings must know, and unhindered by those damn classroom teachers and their professional judgment, and all of it giving up a wondrous river of data, a nectar far more valuable than the vulnerable little humans from whom it was squeezed. Jam the standards in and drag the data out. That's CAP's coherent, aligned future.

ESSA, Teachers, and Business Models

Thomas Arnett is an Education Research Fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, and he's written some classics in the reformster press (like this piece about why teachers shouldn't grade their own students). He has worked for Achievement First Charter and started his educationist career with TFA. So it would make sense to find some of his work on the website of the Brookings Institute, an organization that does an outstanding job of regularly publicizing how little economists understand about education.

"ESSA Unlocks Teacher Prep Innovation" wears its lack of educational understanding on its sleeve. ESSA presents an opportunity, but it's not an opportunity to improve anything about education-- instead, Arnett's understanding of the issues facing education is in this sentence:

But unfortunately, despite the fair amount of consensus regarding needed reforms, schools of education seem to have done little over the last 30 years to fundamentally change their business models to align with suggested reforms.

Yup. What teacher programs need is a new business model.

Arnett's theory is that university education programs are resistant to change because their business models discourage it. And I get that to a point-- as universities and colleges have changed to business models that are based on them acting like businesses instead of institutions of higher learning, getting warm, check-writing bodies in seats has become more of a priority. On the other hand, anyone who thinks that schools of education haven't changed anything in the last several decades simply hasn't looked.  But ultimately Arnett isn't arguing a larger principle here, and he doesn't are about the content of teacher education programs-- he's arguing that teacher prep programs are refusing to adopt the policies that he thinks they should, and that's the business model he wants to fix -- the dreadful Not Listening To Reformsters business model.

Here's what Arnett wants more specifically

Although the standards set by those entities are all well intentioned, they tend to emphasize inputs (such as governance structures, credit hour requirements, and faculty credentials) rather than the quality of their outputs (effective teachers).

Well, yes. Of course, the difference between inputs and outputs like teacher effectiveness is that we have no way of measuring teacher effectiveness. So this like being put out because teacher education measures inputs instead of measuring the amount of magical fairy dust that the candidates are carrying atop their hippogryfs. Arnett wants to replace current systems with a unicorn farm.

He wants to see new schools of education built form the ground up, and he cites a list that includes the Relay Graduate School of Education, which gives you an idea just how high his standards are. He'd like to see more new business modeled schools like that, and not for the first or last time, I wonder what other profession has to put up with this. If I just rent a room or set up a website and announce that I'm now running a school of brain surgery or offering law degrees or certifying engineers, all based on my own personal ideas about how to do those things, nobody lets me get away with that baloney, and nobody argues that I ought to be able to get away with that baloney. If I'm in a terrible car accident, I don't call out, "Whatever you do, don't take me a hospital with trained doctors!"

Only in teaching do we keep having to hear allegedly serious proposals that anybody with a bright idea ought to be allowed to certify teachers. Only in teaching do we keep having to hear the suggestion that the every success in the history of American education was a fluke, because trained teachers are the last people we want in classrooms. Only in teaching do amateurs keep petitioning for the right to declare themselves experts based on nothing except a smattering of expertise in completely other fields-- and getting it!!

Arnett's "new business model" is a model built around the idea that experience and expertise in the teaching field should be thrown out. It never seems to cross his mind that old school teacher prep programs might be based on things that have an actual proven track record with actual trained practitioners of the teacher craft.

And Arnett is excited because he sees the part of ESSA that has written into law that disdain for and rejection of teaching as an actual profession. If you have the stomach for it, you can read a "case study" by Arnett from last summer in which he looks at some charter chains (including his own previous employer) that are running their own teacher prep programs. I'm not going to drag you through it now, but it worries very little about how such faux educators serve the needs of students and communities, and worries considerably more about whether they represent a "sustainable business model."

This is a manufacturing company that says, "Hey, getting certified welders is rally expensive. Why don't we just have Chris from accounting, who once watched a welder, set up our own welding certification program. It'll be faster and cheaper and the welders who come out of it will be inexpensive for us to hire." Hell, this is an urban emergency manager who says, "Yeah, we can just hook up to that other source of water over there. Should be quick and simple, and it'll be cheap! And hell-- we aren't going to drink it ourselves, so who cares."

But here's Arnett's big finish

The challenge for states will be to make sure that the policies and regulations they adopt for authorizing these new programs truly lead to the desired outcome of producing more high-quality teachers.  But if the states can get these details right, the new programs that result may finally lead to the changes in teacher preparation that reformers, public officials, and education groups from across the political spectrum have anticipated for decades.

Not that we know how to identify high quality teachers, but we're sure that amateurs motivated by the chance to make money will totally crack the code of how to churn out HQT quick, cheap, and easy.  (And that link to education groups that would think this is swell? TeachStrong.) 

Yes, it's one more reason to keep an eye on your state during the transition to Life Under ESSA-- among the many stupid ideas that the law holds the door open for is the stupid idea of deprofessionalizing teaching, to turn teachers into cheaply produced, easily replaced, undertrained widgets cranked out by amateur "businesses." Arnett and other reformsters think this is all good news. It's up to the rest of us to work to make sure it's never news, never happens, at all.